Gates to the City

After years of wandering, Rebecca Gates returns to pop and Portland.

“I was living in Rhode Island, at a friends’ house in the
middle of the country. I was spending a lot of time at the ocean, in the
morning and in the evening.”

Rebecca Gates is explaining the origin of “Slowed Lowed Lowered,” the final track on her latest full-length, The Float.
The album is her first release in more than 10 years. The song is a
subtle anomaly, a quietly jarring moment on a record filled with the
type of off-kilter and undeniable pop hooks that Gates crafted as the
primary member of Sub Pop band the Spinanes throughout the ’90s. She
recorded two acclaimed Spinanes records in Portland before moving to
Chicago to record the band’s swan song, Arches and Aisles, and her 2001 solo debut, Ruby Series. Then she seemingly disappeared, leaving her recording career behind and escaping to the Eastern seaboard.

“One of the reasons
why I stopped playing music was because I had a few friends pass away in
quick succession,” Gates says. “I was kind of reeling from that and
lost my mooring a little bit. That song was something that I needed to
make that was super fucked up, but also calming and meditating.”

Over a consistent
blipping electronic soundscape, Gates sings, in her distinctive smoky
alto, “You can lose them any time,” before the song descends into an
alternately soothing and discordant sound collage. It was written for
friends long past, among them Gates’ fellow Portland songwriter, and
sometimes collaborator, Elliott Smith, who died in 2003 of an apparent
suicide. The sorrowful anger is still fresh due to the fact that Gates
actually recorded the song in 2004. Built in a Chicago studio with pop
experimentalist John McEntire, “Slowed Lowed Lowered” was the first of a
long, uncharted writing and recording process with no clear ending. For
the next six years, the unmoored musician shied away from pop music
while establishing a new identity in the world of visual and audio arts,
becoming a sought-after curator.

“I
definitely got to the point with music where I was kind of sick of
myself,” Gates says on a rainy afternoon in her Portland home. “It was
nice to listen to other people and learn about other things. I spent 80
hours a week doing things that didn’t have anything to do with music.
When I was out and about and someone might say, ‘Are you the woman who
was in the Spinanes?’ But it wasn’t the same.”

Still, Gates couldn’t
resist making music. In those six years, she squirreled away song ideas
and found time to escape to studios across the country. She recorded
songs in six different locations, including Portland, Montreal and
Dallas, with dozens of musicians and eight different engineers. Despite
the fractured orchestra of players, the songs Gates created in those
years had a consistent vision wielded by a confident conductor unafraid
to make demands of her players. The new collaborations also allowed
Gates to reimagine her established style. Star turns by the Cribs’
singer Gary Jarman on the first single, “&&&,” as well as
Wild Flag keyboardist Rebecca Cole and Los Lobos horn player Steve
Berlin on the funk-lite track “Lease and Flame,” expanded the
possibilities of Gates’ pop songcraft, giving her inimitable vocals and
simple, bright guitar lines new places to play.

Three years ago,
after wrapping up a gig curating a sound art installation in Marfa,
Texas, Gates decided it was time to finish what she had started. She
drove to Portland, the city she had left in 1997, and entered the studio
with Larry Crane, refreshing the songs of the past years with overdubs
and mixing the album. Then something unexpected happened. She didn’t
leave.

“I had actually just
planned on being in Portland for six months, and that was about three
years ago,” she says. “I think one of the things that is important for
me is that Portland is a very different town than it was when I left. I
am kind of enamored with what is going on here, in terms of art and in
terms of sustainability. And Portland allows me time to think and to
work on a lot of different things. Things that, when I was in other
cities, I didn’t necessarily have the energy for and when I was in
Portland before I didn’t necessarily have the vocabulary for.”